Marcus - > The refusal to optimize on one dimension is in general a good policy. I assume you mean this in the sense of "single issue voters" and in the more general sense of multivariate optimization being more "effective" than univariate in general problem solving? > And illustrating the interchangeability of symbols in a structural > argument is also a good thing. I'm guessing this references the Sticks and Stones issue? Or perhaps more? What Glen was seeming to try to do when you called "bait and switch" on him? > A better way to argue though, which is not to boil the ocean but simply to > say, "Instances are of no interest to me, let's talk about the class." > Relates to this: > https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/07/27/what-conservatives-gets-wrong-about-cosmopolitans
I'm liking this article (after fighting my way through the WP's ad-blocking-blocker in conflict with my recently upgraded Firefox's automatic ad-blocking, etc. I went looking for the "complement" of "Cosmopolitan" and have yet to find anything satisfying, the *antonyms* being all somewhat less helpful than I hoped. My pursuit is in service of trying to understand what the paths might be from the extreme parochialism that comes with being born into *one body* and raised (usually) by *one family* in *one community/region/province/nation* to what the article articulates so well about what "true Cosmopolitanism" can be. As a "recovering" conservative (never registered Republican, but voted Reagan (once)) I am not sure if I grew out of a parochialism inherited from being born/raised rurally, among people whose bread was buttered entirely by extractive "industry" (mostly ranching, some timber, some mining) or if it was (as it felt at the time) escaping the naivete of youth, wanting my answers to all be simple (if you ain't with me, you must be against me!). And a victim of those who would exploit that naivete with their rhetoric. As I look at our country (the entire first world?) under an extreme tectonic tension between what seems like cosmipolitanism and parochialism I find myself looking to "routes out" of that tension. A colleague once offered me the meta-pattern (intending it to apply to software engineering, but being more generally useful in all design/engineering) of "If you find a problem too hard to solve, add an extra level of indirection". "Extra degree of freedom" or "extra dimension" might also be substituted. What IS the "extra level of indirection" that is useful in resolving some of this tension without requiring the equivalent of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions? It seems the feature of Obama voters becoming Trump voters reflects some of this tension. Two *very* different targets of "populism" and "hopey-changeyism"... One (to me) much more virulent than the other. > The nationalists and demagogues refuse to argue their general point, and > instead rely on preemptively registered ontologies to persuade. This tweaks my general intuition about the question of how we obtain and form our ontologies and how we possibly might resolve them against one another. My primary *technical* work with ontologies began with the Gene Ontology which was an attempt to resolve *many* disparate bodies of knowledge/understanding about genes into a single global ontology. I was (and continue to be) only a layman in biology at best (or using Glen's term, dilletante) so a lot of what was implicit in the Gene Ontology (ca 2004) was arcane to me, but I had hints that a *lot* of compromises were made to fit them all together. It seems that politics and maybe even more to the point "statesmanship" has the same problem. We have two general ontologies encoded in our major political parties/movements where anti-Abortion, Gun Rights, Death Penalty, and Hawkishness reside comfortably together while roughly the complement (appositionally opposite?) values, mores of the "other party" also seem to fit together even though both sides would seem to have huge internal tension within their value system/ontology (e.g the left splitting hairs about when is a foetus a human and when is it OK to use deadly force?). Perhaps when held in dynamic tension, the two in opposition help to hide/hold the paradoxes at bay in the other? Are we on the verge of some kind of potential "overdue refactoring" as opposed to "total collapse"? The article on Cosmopolitanism seems to reference this somewhat... That "giving a damn about the world at large" does not have to be in opposition to "giving a damn about one's family/community/region/nation", yet it is caricatured/characterized that way so often. How might one (one self or all-one) resolve this kind of (artificial/rhetorical?) difference without geologic upheaval? - Steve > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
